The Point

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Poverty, polls, and gunpoints

Last year, I wrote about Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize-winning social activist and her self-titled memoirs. This month, she faced a spectacular defeat in her foray into the Guatemalan presidential polls. There's some hubbub that her sixth-place standing, at somewhere between 2 and 3% of the vote, reflects her inability to sway male voters and those among other indigenous tribes, and seemingly contradictory suspicions about her perceived wealth and a reluctance to share it amid others, mistrusting her inability to fund strategies like radio and television ads, that a "poor campaign would translate into poor governance." A New York Times story today showed her at a funeral for two party members shot last week; violence was apparently among the chief election issues in the country.

I try to imagine living on less than $2 US a day, what over half of Guatemala's population earn. I'm trying to conceive of the choices I'd be making every day between water (if there was any to acquire), food (hoping biofuel production doesn't push up the price of corn), school for more kids than I could keep under one roof. I don't understand how Oprah Winfrey can stand behind that absurd The Secret DVD set and say the events in our lives are determined entirely and absolutely by our attitude towards the world.

Two things come to my mind when I read that article: First, that scene in Maria, Full of Grace where she's cutting roses in that factory in the dewy morning. The second is a conversation I had last night about whether we'll ever put concerns about the true costs of industrial manufacturing abroad above our need for products to be available as cheap, quick and convenient as possible. I genuinely don't know.

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posted by Christopher at 4:53 a.m.

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